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Fish Recipes

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Fish Recipes

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Shake off excess flour from the whitebait.

  2. Plunge the whitebait into boiling fat for about 1.5 minutes.

  3. Remove and place on a wire sieve. Repeat with remaining whitebait.

  4. Ensure there is enough fat in the pan to cover the fish and bring it back to a boil.

  5. Fry the fish in the basket for 1-2 minutes until crisp.

  6. Sprinkle half the fish with coarse sea salt and coralline pepper or cayenne.

  7. Arrange the fish in two piles on a serving dish, garnished with lemon slices and parsley.

  8. Cut 12 thin slices of brown bread and butter, roll them neatly, and trim the ends.

  9. Beat the egg white slightly and chop parsley finely, then dry it with a cloth.

  10. Put the chopped parsley in one saucer and coralline pepper in another.

  11. Brush the ends of the bread rolls with egg white, dip one end in parsley and the other in coralline pepper.

  12. Arrange the rolls in a circle on a plate, with a bunch of parsley in the center.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

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